Some of the most gripping movie plots are punctuated with scenes where a character has to quickly explain themselves out of a suspicious looking situation.
Maybe they are innocent person who just so happens to be wielding a bloody object a stone's throw from a crime scene, or perhaps they look like they're trespassing while trying to get into their home, whatever the scenario, the most compelling "wait let me explain moments" often feel too cartoonish to happen in real life.
And yet, the real world is often weirder than any fiction, and there are moments when people find themselves caught in a bizarre scenario straight out of a movie plot.
In a popular Reddit thread, the OP asked people to share their craziest "I can explain" stories, and the internet delivered.
1. OP kicked off the thread:
Here's the full story from the title:
First, some background info. I live in Pennsylvania and you're allowed to (and usually have to) pump your own gas. In New Jersey, it's illegal to pump your own gas.
So, some friends are driving around New Jersey. Said friend is the member of a band and, with him, is the other 3 members of his band, his girlfriend, and another friend. That's 6 people. The car only has seats for 5. So, on a trip to the gas station, one bandmate figures it'd be fun to ride in the trunk.
This guy is a bit crazy in the best way. On the way from the venue to the gas station, while in the trunk, he gets totally naked save for a pink bandana around his neck so he can surprise the sh*t out of everyone when they get back.
The car arrives at the gas station and, realizing they have to let someone pump their gas, they pull up to a pump and an attendant comes to help them. When he asks my friend to open the door covering the gas valve thingy, with him being used to manually opening it himself (as opposed to using the automatic button inside the car), he fumbles around for the button...
And pops the trunk.
There lays a naked man, who looks a bit like a beardless Jesus, wearing nothing but a pink bandana.
The best part is my friend didn't even realize it was the wrong button. So, the attendant just stands there awkwardly as the guy in the trunk tries to shut the trunk while everyone in the car sits looking bored with straight faces.
I used to have to unload stuff from my work truck into my garage. It wasn't uncommon for me to forget to shut the tailgate on the covered truck bed. In the summer it wasn't such a bad thing, but in the winter, cats would take shelter in it.
On bad nights, I would intentionally leave it open. These were cats other neighbors just let roam the neighborhood, often forgetting about them. I felt bad for them, but didn't want to bring them into my house because I didn't want fleas/disease transferred to my animals.
I got into the habit of smacking the bed with my hand before shutting the tailgate and driving to work. When I smacked the bed, the cats would usually jet out the back of the truck. I would do a quick look in and then shut the tailgate. One wintery, blistery day I woke up late. So I ran out the door, slammed the tailgate without thinking about or doing the obligatory bed-smack/look.
On the way to the job, I stopped to get gas at a station really close to my house and remembered I needed gas for my snowblower. I usually had a gas can in the bed. I stopped at the gas station, which was a typically busy in the morning gas station and started filling the truck.
I went back to the tailgate to open it to get the gas can out. I dropped the tailgate and about six, terrified cats came racing out of the bed. One actually ran up and over me, leaping from my shoulder. They did this big loopity-loop, panic run in the gas station and then headed off into the neighborhood. They all made it out safe and we were only a few blocks from my house.
But for one instant. Everyone in the gas station froze to stare at me. People inside were staring out at me. People at the pumps were staring at me. I've never felt so judged in my life, it was like i was trafficking humans. I could feel their eyes penetrating my soul. It was about 10o F out and I could feel myself starting to sweat.
When I went in to get coffee, the silence finally broke and a woman asked me what it was all about. I explained it to her, rather loudly so that everyone who witnessed it could hear it. I don't think they believed me.
I was in my early twenties. And we were spending a couple of weeks at a friend's beach house in an upscale east coast resort town. One late night, we decide it would be a great idea to crash the local community swimming pool for a skinny dip. So seven guys and gals pile into one sedan to head off for the challenge. I am the only non-drinker, so I am the naturally designated driver.
We arrive at the pool, shimmy through an opening in the fence, chuck off all of our clothes and jump in. hilarity ensues...until. Wait! someone has notified the cops of our presence. As we see the cop car search light scanning for us, we freak. Time to make a fast escape and pile back into the ride undetected. But not enough time to get dressed. So we are now a car full of seven people (six of them drunk) covered in nothing but towels. And we drive away, confident in our success.
However, in all the excitement, I manage to make an illegal left turn as part of our getaway. And, you guessed it, cop car lights up and pulls me over.
The officer gets out and approaches the car full of mostly naked twenty-somethings. He takes a look and says to me, with a straight face and without missing a beat, "I don't reckon you'd have a drivers license under there - would you?"
Where even to begin.
I had just put air ride on my truck and was taking it on it's maiden voyage. I forgot to tuck a brake line and had been unknowingly dragging through it. All of the sudden it decides to let loose right as I'm stopping at a stop sign. I'm half way through the intersection with no brakes when I see a cop sitting waiting to bust people for blowing through. He pulls me over and I try to explain. He clearly doesn't believe me so he asks me to press my brake pedal. Boom. Brake fluid squirted right on to his shoe. No ticket.
Me and my roommates came home late one night from a night of drinking. It's about 2 a.m., and there is a knock on our back door. I open it up and there is a tall, muscular fellow there wearing only a t-shirt and tennis shoes, cupping his unmentionables and covered in bloody gashes. He says he can explain, that the cops are after him, and asks to come in. My other roommate comes down and is like "Absolutely, come right in! No one comes to someone's door naked in the middle of the night to start trouble. You come because you need help, right?"
So the guy starts in on this story of how they are at a house party up the street. They are loud and have had a few noise complaints, so the cops are essentially sitting on the corner just waiting to bust them. He thinks it would be a good idea to take his pants off and go streaking by a parked police cruiser. Hint: It was not a good idea. Two cops start chasing him, another goes into the house to start interrogating his friends.
Did I mention this was a tall muscular dude? He runs laps around the overweight police men, then takes off across a field to either outrun them or hide. As I understand, he distances himself by about 75 yards, then runs headlong into a barbed-wire fence. The barbs had left huge gashes in his stomach, chest and legs, but he untangles himself and hides in a culvert as the cops roam the neighborhood with flashlights looking for him.
Flash forward 2 hours, he sees us come home, across from the field where he is hiding, and makes his way to our back door and recounts his tale. We give him a beer, a pair of gym shorts, and escort him back to his house party, where he is greeted with raucous laughter, applause, and more then a few disgruntled looks from the people he had left to be interrogated by the police for an hour. The entire party covered for him, claiming that they didn't know him and that he had not left his pants with them (they hid them, and his wallet). It all worked out.
Once opened my front door to two Jehovah's Witnesses - which in turn opened to a bedroom with what looked like 6 naked men in a giant bed together (they ran off down the street before my hungover brain could figure out why they were freaked out).
We were just hungover and watching crappy cartoons on my projector. Just straight equally hungover men watching cartoons topless in bed together. 0.o
I got real drunk with my girlfriend and her mate one Saturday night. They convinced me to wear a dress and then when I passed out in a chair in the living room they covered me in makeup, lipstick, blush, mascara, the works. I looked like a clown.
So I wake up in the chair 9am Sunday with a jolt as someone is knocking loudly at the door Still half drunk I open the door to 2 Mormons, they look at me shocked, stammer "we've got the wrong house" and leave. Took me a few secs to realize what I looked like to them.
Back when I was in graduate school, this woman named Amal in one of my classes suggested we get together and study. I prefer studying on my own but, so as not to be rude, I agreed anyways. She scribbless her number down, I put it in my wallet, and then promptly forget about the whole thing. About a year later my wife was looking for a card in my wallet while we were driving down the road and stumbles across the slip of paper.
She opens it up and in a shocked voice asks, "What the hell is this?" By this time, my memory of getting her number was almost completely gone as was most of the letter M in Amal. So when I read the piece of paper I see exactly what my wife sees: One word Anal, followed by a phone number. I immediately say I can explain, but given that I had forgotten about getting her number, the next 20 seconds involved a mixture of panic and confusion as I tried to remember how the hell I could have possibly ended up with a solicitation for anal sex in my wallet.
I finally put together what had happened and we had a pretty good laugh over it. However, I often wondered how that would have turned out if I never could have remembered where it came from.
TL;DRLearned my wife will believe anything Had to explain why I had a solicitation for anal sex in my wallet.
I have a hand held electric nail file. It's really..well...dildo shaped. I had some friends over for a sleepover one night and my friend pulls it out and gives me this look of abject horror...I don't think she believed me when I told her its just a nail file.
Similar, back in the day (I'm talking 33.6K modems) I was a big fan of Dungeon Keeper 2 and had downloaded a couple of wallpapers from the website for my computer. When I got home from school the next day I was asked by my mother in a very stern manner what "horny_mistress_640x480.bmp" was.
"Well, they're characters from this game I've been playing" wasn't the best start to my explanation.
That'd be the time I follow too many links (using my phone) which end up linking to a gay orgy vid, I closed the browser right away, decided I had have enough internet for the day, next morning I try to show a something on reddit to my bro, and yeah gay porn starts playing, that was an difficult conversion.
I was recently walking home, and saw a bunch of bird crap on the sidewalk in front of me. I heard birds in the trees above, so I decided to walk around the drop zone, which put me in the street. As I stepped into the street, I noticed a mid-to-late twenties black gentleman walking the opposite way on the sidewalk.
I have never received a look of disgust that great at any other time in my life.
When I was an intern (I'm a doctor) I examined an admittedly ridiculously hot girl who was having palpitations. I took out my stethoscope and listened to her heart under her hospital gown. I clumsily and very accidentally (while holding the stethoscope) brushed her nipple with my hand and her heart starts beating faster and the alarm of the heart monitor starts going off. In comes the nurse to see what's happening and there I am with my hand under her top and both of us are blushing like mad and me looking very, very guilty.
Worked at a bike shop and one day a man in a wheelchair comes in to get a flat fixed on his chair. I put a new tube in and rang him up. He was quite pleased with how low the price was. I told him, "Yeah, any other shop in town would have probably charged you and arm and a leg." The guy was missing an arm and a leg. Could have heard a pin drop.
So my mom decided to borrow my laptop without telling me once, and when she opened it at work she found a folder full of animal, granny, bbw, and pregnant woman porn.
EXPLANATION: it wasn't an actual folder, it was an image of a screenshot that I had taken. I was borrowing Internet from a neighbor, who had his entire computer on a shared network, for some reason. Being the nosy teenager I was, I browsed his files and found the creepiest stash of porn I had never even heard of.
I couldn't stop laughing, so I took a screenshot (just of the file names), pasted into a paint file and saved it. However, I didn't close out of the paint file before I shut my laptop. My mother knows nothing about computers, and I NEVER expected her to randomly take mine to work. So when that was the first thing she saw as she opened my computer, she freaked out.
My friend, who is a film student, tends to make about 1-3 short films every summer when he's home from college. I usually help him out. He doesn't have a printer at his house, so it's always been my job to print out one or two scripts to do a read through with him and the actors.
One of his shorts was about a closeted lesbian who was in love with her best friend. The last page of the script involved a passionate kiss and then some screaming. And, of course, when I was stapling them, one of those pages fell to the ground.
My mother, who has always suspected me of being a lesbian, found it and assumed I had written it. She absolutely wouldn't believe me when I said it belonged to my friend.
The leader of the local girl scout troop belonged to the same pool as my family. One day I went to pick up my daughter from her scout meeting. With a few of the other mothers I didn't know, as well as most of the girl scouts all paying attention to me since I had just walked in, the leader exclaimed (once she figured out who I was there to pick up)..."I didn't recognize you with your clothes on"...The look on the faces of the other mothers was priceless.
I got a hole in my favorite sweater when I was around 12. It was made of that stretchy, thin material that's impossible to mend without being obvious, so I was looking for alternatives to save it. I got this idea that nail polish would keep the hole from spreading, but I didn't have any clear, so I used a dark maroon color that matched the shirt.
The hole was on the chest of the shirt, so was eye-level for most of the boys in my 6th grade class. I figured I had to do something to make my bra less obvious through the hole, so I grabbed a bra I didn't like and painted it with the same nail polish. Perfect.
Mom found the bra first and accepted that I had spilled nail polish on it. I'm not sure why I didn't tell the truth, but I was a kid and kids are weird.
Then my mom found the sweater. All she saw was a hole with a dark, crusty ring and she assumed I had been smoking and had burned a hole in the sweater. I had never smoked in my life, never left the house without her except to go to school, and had no way to get to a store that sold cigarettes without a car.
Yet I was still grounded. For smoking. She didn't believe my story, not even paired with the painted bra.
tl;dr: Painted my shirt with nail polish, my mom jumped to conclusions
About 8 years ago me and some friends were working in Northern Italy around this time of year and we decided to hire a car and drive into Germany for Octoberfest.
After finding a carpark in Munich we (3 guys, 2 girls) head off to enjoy the beer. A few hours pass and my girlfriend is pretty drunk and looks like she's gonna start puking soon so we all decide to take her back to the car and let her have a bit of sleep on the back seat. Trying to get her into the car was a different story though because she wanted to "sleepy ina da back, no really back the car". Naturally we throw her in the boot and she went to sleep.
The rest of us locked the car and off we went to find a bar. Many, many beers and sing songs later we were heading back to the car when two policemen stopped us in the street and asked us for our IDs. We explained that all our stuff was in our hire car around the corner. The nice policemen offered to walk with us to the car so we could show them that we were legit European citizens and we weren't trying to smuggle people into the country or anything absurd like that.
Get to the car, open the boot, Italian girlfriend is still asleep on our bags. The police look at eachother and I quickly explain why there is what appears to be a drugged up kidnap victim in our car. After waking her up she starts shouting at the police because she was "nice sleepy der". The policemen check all our passports and one of them wishes me luck dealing with my crazy drunk girlfriend and gives me a wink.
This was pretty harmless but it still shocked me a bit...
I recently realized my childhood dream and bought a telescope. It's a rather large 6" Newtonian reflector. I'm a huge astronomy fan and my parents were too poor to afford one when I was young.
I live in a city, and my apartment has a balcony that faces several other buildings and apartments.
I have never owned a telescope before, so naturally, when it finally arrived I wanted to assemble it as fast as possible. I did this in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in my living room. I struggled a bit but after an hour or so, I was finished.
Obviously the first thing you do when you get a telescope is look through it so I took a quick glance through it, at a hill, into the distance. It worked and I was a happy camper. I then tried to work through the "collimation" procedure that I read about and it seemed to work. You basically tune your mirrors so that they produce a good image.
A bit later I realized that an old lady from a building across the courtyard probably stared at me through her window through the entire procedure.
I didn't think much about it, and left the telescope assembled in my living room.
After the evening I tried to have a look a the stars from my balcony. Light pollution was bad but, hey, I wanted to familiarize myself with the scope before I wanted to take it to the outskirts of the city. I did see the stars and it was magnificent! I think I even caught a fast moving satellite, it was pretty cool.
And there she was that again, that old lady stared at me from her dimly lit window. She probably thought that I was the creep and peeping into other people's living rooms with this giant telescope.
I figured that I'd try to talk with her the next day and explain that I'm just getting into amateur astronomy and she doesn't need to worry.
Little did I know that half an hour the cops would knock at my door! I explained it to them but after they left I still think that they only half-believed me. In fact they gave me that look of disapproval, as if only a deranged person would buy a telescope in the first place.
I find this rather aggravating because, hey, we're living on a f*cking piece of rock flying around a giant fireball at 30km/s and is a glorious night sky filled with thousands of stars out there. I mean yeah, who the f*ck would want to marvel at the night sky when you can watch a rerun of Jersey Shore or whatever.
Anyways, the next day I invited the old lady to my apartment. We drank tea and I showed her the telescope and tried to explain what I knew about it. It was pretty heart warming. She thanked me and I told her that if she ever wanted to, she could accompany me and my girl friend to a night of sky gazing.